Language Crimes: The Criminal Act of Reading in the Margins

Readers don’t always realize that reading can be a subversive act, a transgressive act, and even a crime. It all depends on what one is reading.

I am rrreading your mind, Readrrr.

If one is reading the tabloids, for instance, one will not be arrested, although the tabloids might have one believe otherwise. Alas, the government is fine with you reading that J-Lo was abducted by aliens last night and is the subject of an extraterrestrial research study. To the government: not a threat. They will gladly give up the mass suspension of your disbelief about J-Lo in order to keep the wool over your readrrrly eyes about…other things. And, anyway, the aliens only took her because they wanted to know how to turn a green Versace dress into an asteroid — aliens, as everyone knows, are so militant when it comes to high fashion. Their motto: “Give me fashion or give me your planet.” No biggie. Not a threat. Not, oh, say, like a little nun raising her hand in the middle of Catholic mass to ask a question (we’ll save that story for another time, when the little nun’s thirty year sentence comes to an end-like beginning).

The government is happy to have you read about weapons of mass destruction in the Huffington Post, and anything else you want to read. But there are some things the government does not want you to read. As a spy, I have insider information on this. Believe my spyglass mind when I tell you…

What the government does not want you to read about: THE NUNS!

There, I said it. The nuns are the best kept non-violent weapon of mass reconstruction on the planet, and, as such, they pose a great threat to most governments around the world.

Liberating Minds is what reading is all about!

The nuns are Global Revolutionaries, spiritually dangerous to the misogynist and patriarchal infrastructure in the most extreme way possible– and it’s mostly because no one knows about the nuns. Or cares. (Bastards, all, but the nuns are above bastardry.)

The nuns are fine with this.

No one knows about the nuns because no one cares to know about the nuns because one of patriarchy-and-misogyny’s quintessential flaws is its masochistically narcissistic self-interest: patriarchy only listens to patriarchy; misogyny only listens to its own voice– and the internal fighting that happens therein is a performative and brainlessly vain repetitive history of self-mutilation.

I shed no light on the mutiny that has always existed, but what matters is its farthest fetched implication: that voices that speak in languages outside of ‘the nuclear-active realm’ escape the ears and minds of those within its con-fines.

In other words (because, Readrrr, I know your ears are open and you read me soft and obscured), the most dangerous threat to a humanity written in domination and submission is a language that it cannot access, let alone speak. If you want to understand what I am saying, look to all forms of division within human culture. Humans are at war within the patriarchy because they are operating within the violent limits of patriarchal languages (a virtual reality we access in glimpses): factions speak with different dialects but always within the same language. There is nothing new under the sun but, Readrrr, there is something new under the nuns.

My Readrrr knows how to SPELL!

The world, which purports itself to knows its own sphereicality, continues to perpetuate a reality of flatness. We say Earth is round but continue to treat it as though it is flat, making obvious what we, ourselves, cannot admit by virtue of an extinctive lack of introspection: that we are in an active and vile state of denial.

To quote myself and represent the nuns, I repeat, “The widespread lack of interest in language is masochistic. We are language. Why does our narcissism stop short of linguistic introspection?”

The above is a rhetorical question, much like the question of the existence of God, and such a question, asked within this marginalia, this subversive new form of feminist journalizm, is designed to answer, not to ask (or to not-ask) such a question.

‘Global warming’ is code-word for ‘planetary implosion due to widespread(ing) imperialistic mentality’. Climate change is not a problem: it is a symptom of a problem, and the answer to it cannot be found within the languages of science, religion, or any other patriarchy-dominated institution. The answer starts with, and goes back to, the nuns.

So, Readrrr, come here and learn a new language. I am not a prophet; ‘prophet’ is the imperialistic term that cultures give to men who uphold in some idealistic way cultural values. Prophets do not call themselves prophets, if you haven’t noticed. Men call prophets ‘prophets’. It is a way of raising the status of ‘the worshiped one’, in a predictably patriarchal way. The nuns are all about worshiping icons; they are not beyond the practice at all. Their wisdom and transcendence, however, lie in recognizing the deeper and sometimes crude nature of the practice. It also lies in their ability to linguistically nuncover counter-culture prophetic sources.

I, Little Sistrrr Grim, am less than a street urchin. I am poor, I am abhorred, I am ignored. But I have been granted with grace the gift of divine nunconventional wisdom, and so for the days that remain, I will, on behalf of the nuns, speak what the nuns’ actions have said silently for centuries. Remember, I am a spy, Readrrr, possessing linguistic knowledge-less wisdom only attributable to The Divine. And The Divine speaks through and with the highly imperfect nuns.

Little Sistrrr Grim is rrready to fight for her rrright to RRREAD.

If you look to the actions of the nuns, there is much evidence that stands as a testament to the divinely inarticulate and inarguable truth that: There is no access to God without a departure from the violence of patriarchal language. For language creates and reflects reality, and if a Man-ually derived myth of violence writes its way into the fabric of humanity, then that flammable fabric will, in logical succession, inadvertently and suicidally burn to nothing. Manversation, for centuries, has tried to disguise itself as God’s Word, but this form of pestilent drivel, unworthy (as diametrically opposed to nunworthy) of even calling itself The Slime of God reigns supreme (i.e., as high-power garbage) in the short-lived Maniverse, the human world destined for sure and fast destruction.

I, street walker that I am, have many times tried to engage in con-versation with manversationalists. Each time I have done this, and countless have been the times, I have departed from it either having devolved into a full-blown wild ape or evolved into a shrieking, wailing witch. The latter is preferable, as to “go gorilla”, as I find fitting to call it though it does an injustice to gorillas, is to be made a victim by a vile MAN-tality, whereas to “hiss hysteric”, a preferable mode for dealing with manversationalism, is to embrace a foreign language inaccessible to imperialists– a much-maligned and fortunately misunderstood one.

What happens when a rrrreader rrrrejects the patriarchy!

Ever been called a bitch, Readrrr? Ever been called a witch, Readrrr?

If so, you are in the company of the nuns. Your crowning achievement in this is that you have shown yourself to be capable of patriarchal discord, rejection and transcendence. You speak a foreign language. Manglish is not your first language: there is a language suppressed in you that has been trying to emerge for thousands of years. Isn’t it exciting, Readrrr, to know that you know a language you didn’t even know you knew. (Read on, Readrrr…)

That language is here, and it is all around you, if you look at language in an anciently new way. Study language uses with me, and study the nuns, and you will begin to know a language within you that is so old it’s new.

Angela Davis: Readrrr

Until we can fluently speak a language outside of Manversation, we will continue to be plagued by Old Testament drama (without New Testament resolution). The Circle of Life will be the Life Line, and the nuns will be a pocket of light in a dark hole blemish in the hiss-story of our heavenly universe.

But if you have any hope for linguistic reform, look to the palm, or hips, of any nun and, if you possess nun-vision, you will see an odd life-line pattern, obscured, centrifugal, and subterfugal.

There is no speaking our way out of a linguistic world as vile as the one spoken by the major religions of the world as long as we are accepting their mutual premise of domination/submission. The revolutionary socialist and nun-of-all-nuns, JESUS CHRIST, is (that to which nuns are living witnesses and testaments), the genderless sun of God, whose sacrificial example on earth prophetically speaks in opposition against the maniversal war-perpetuating myth.

Look, Readrrr: I’m inviting you to read my thesis. You can be THE ONLY ONE. Lucky you…

When the nuns read the Old Testament, they cry tears of sorrow when The Maniverse speaks and tears of joy when Divine Mercy speaks. They know there is a difference. The nuns draw lines, oh yes they do, when reading the Bible. They pick and choose using their divine sensibilities and sensitivities: a tender ethic imbued in them by God. They do not buy into the Maniversal Myth that there is a binaristic God who in a fit of interplanetary bi-polarism sometimes chooses violence and sometimes chooses mercy. God is a God of mercy. The Maniverse breeds hate, violence, and monstrosity. These are not of God and not qualities belonging to God. There is no split-faced God of Wrath and God of Peace, to the nuns. When the God of Wrath speaks, it is obvious to the nuns that a man with a self-serving cause has taken God’s podium. There is only the God of Peace and Love: and, in the Bible or in any other religious text, you have to look for it– to search for it and find it amidst the weeds of patriarchal storytelling. In justice, in all things, God’s wrath is not, like man’s wrath, derived of imperialistic vanity. God’s wrath is a hate of unrighteousness: a disapproval of domination; God’s mercy is divine reflection, not posturing: it is a love of egalitarian righteousness.

The warmongers, who for ages have upstaged the nuns, hold God’s Word hostage, proclaiming blasphemy on one another, and all of this is a distraction from Divine Love. We are all culpable, but not powerless to start engaging in incensed but non-violent peace talks.

So what does all of this have to do with reading practices? Only everything.

Only Everything, Readrrr

The nuns taught me how to read criminally. It is a subversive, loving practice. It is radical. It is pedagogical. It is subversively, extraordinarily, boundary-lessly loving, and, therefore, criminal. To read criminally is to read with a criminal earnestness, with an avid sense of culpability and with a fierce commitment to language that goes below deck and above the radar of linguistic policing, beyond the confines of patriarchal rule-boundedness. It is psychic and it is indomitable.

Suffragette, Under Arrest. Let me guess: she began her “life of crime” with RRREADING.

It is an alternate way of rrreading.

Think on these questions, softly, Gentle Readrrr:

What is it to read something from ‘cover to cover’? (The nuns taught me to read without covers.)

What is it to read from ‘start to finish’? (The nuns taught me to read from finish to start.)

To read without linearity. To read without polarity. To read without literalism (but not without vulgarity). All lessons I learned in my long-terms engagement of reading with the nuns.

My Readrrr has read Hexmistresses of Mayhem from Covrrr to Lovrrr

Ah, rrreading. When are we (k)not rrreading? (I love to rrread my Readrrr’s mind while I’m writing and at all times, so it is accurate to say that I am all ways rrreading.)

There are so many possibilities as to what one rrreads. I, personally, would rather read what the majority isn’t reading. And, for me, this is easy, because reading the mind of my Readrrr is a very, very singular experience. No one else is doing it.

How about you, Readrrr? Are you following me? Are you reading my mind?

World-class Mind-Readrrr: Sylvia Pankhurst

You see, there is more to reading than meets the eye. Sometimes what we read implicates us. And sometimes how we read implicates us. And so reading is always, to some degree, an admission of guilt, or at least of involvement.

This is where what I am saying turns suspect. And be suspicious, Readrrr; you should always be very suspicious when you read, particularly when you read into what I am saying and read what I am not saying. (There is where you will do your “real reading.”)

Sistrrr Shakespeare: NUN, through-and-through

Would it entice you to think that you were reading something highly illegal, Readrrr? All of us are readers, whether we admit it or not. And all readers are guilty of engaging psychically in the act of reading: or, in the act of what they’re reading, but to a less tangible extent. (Butt, gnot all of us arrrgh rrreadrrrs…)

Rrreading is the safe house of transgression. Wrrriting, too, as a form of rrreading, serves the same purpose. Readers and writers, and reading-writers and writing-readers, are bound up blissfully in this House of Sin. But it, through its metaphorical transgression against transgression, is not truly a House of Sin at all: it is a Safe House Against Sin.

Nuns, Reading in the Safe House (i.e., Shabby Abbey Bathroom)

To read about acts one is capable of committing but chooses not to commit can be a most honorable form of righteousness: the overcoming of our base Maniversal impulses toward conflict and violence via the deliberate act of engaging in linguistic supposition. Is it not transgressive to become equal to others, and to develop empathy for others, in the safe harbor of language? It is.

Using the giant bottle of foot as a SPYGLASS to spy on the nuns…

Many illegal things are legal on the page. Some, and maybe many, societies, collectively give a Get Out of Jail Free card to those who act primarily through the means of reading and writing. (There’s your ticket to freedom, Sweet Readrrr-on-the-run.)

There are certain ways this world polices our behavior, our gender representations, our expressions of love, our abilities to speak our minds, and so on. But we transcend this policing of our beautiful, unique lives when we use our voices and speak with one another on the page, however you define the page.

Agatha Christie: NUN SPY EXTRAORDINAIRE!

When I write to you on this blog, Readrrr, I am sharing the delicate documents of my thoughts and of who I am with you. My wicked life is, ironically, not that wicked at all, without the filter of the Maniverse’s blind judgment, but I embrace the label of wicked and I make it my own: as I believe we make our realities with language, and if we don’t like a particularly fiction-dubbed-reality, we can rearrange it and turn it on its head. We can transgress and take a language that is used to enact violence, and we can re-purpose it to work against that very violence. Dangerous and illegally legal, indeed.

You might say I’m here to get you to read illegal documents. You might say I’m here to get you to listen to illegal aliens. You might say I’m here to involve you and implicate you, simply by making you my readrrr.

Readrrr, when you read my words, you become part of me, part of my reality, part of my crimes against the patriarchy, and you, therefore, are my equal: and we will share a bunk, and maybe even an orange jumper, when we end up in the proverbial slammer. And, Readrrr, we are one.

Let’s try not to end up here, Readrrr.

What, Readrrr, you don’t think “the authorities” will arrr(gh)est you and haul your Viking ass to jail for the subversive act of rrreading? Think again. The authorities want your ass as much as I want your eyes. They know it was built in the dark ages, shaped like The Joker’s smile and used for trading, raiding, and exploring. They want the name of your skipper and your captain, and they are not afraid to use tax dollars to do it.

What they won’t do is read, Readrr. So you’re off the hook despite these given “facts.” And, Hook Readrrr, ‘your books’ will protect and defend you until the end-seeming dawn of time.

I am the least criminal of all criminals, like many other social deviants, and like you, Readrrr. You are witnessing an ancient form of linguistic espionage that I like to call Jesspionage. To engage in Jesspionage is to spy on nuns for the political purpose of raising awareness within the Maniverse about the f/act that nun-violent (nunfounded non violent) languages do exist and do matter to existence.

Jesspionage is the criminal act of reading like a nun-spy.

Why would you be interested in learning to read like a nun-spy? Why it’s all in your head, Readrrr. And in mine.

You want to lead a life of crime! You are sick of male domination! You are tired and nun-fit for the times!

My Readrrr’s reaction if anything or anyone tries to stop them from rrreading about the nuns!

Yes, Readrrr. I know.

Well, come here, Readrrr. Rrreading my mind is one crime you can commit without repercussion: rrread to your guilty conscience’s content and rrread like a criminal: both to lose and save your life.

(But always substitute your “l” with a “w”, and always use a sharp wife.)

And never rrread another word, another thought, without understanding that you arrre implicated in a web of crrriminality.